Alexander McQueen has set a box office record five years after his death. More than 480,000 tickets were sold for “Savage Beauty” – the late designer’s Victoria & Albert (V&A) London museum’s exhibition of his work which has just closed. It becomes most the most popular show to be staged at the museum.

High demand during the 21-week run saw V&A chiefs open the museum overnight for the first time for an exhibition, adding another 15,000 tickets to the overall sales.

V&A deputy director Tim Reeve told the Press Association: “We planned for it to be more successful than David Bowie (the V&A’s 2013 show which sold 311,956 tickets) but getting 480,000 visitors is over 100,000 more than we expected to get.

“We have a lot of experience running big exhibitions but we did not predict it would be that big.”

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